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Specifically this user: https://stackoverflow.com/users/688654/amol

His questions are coming quickly and have problems:

  • They require significant editing (which the SO community is stepping up, but it might just be a waste of time).
  • Over half get closed or close votes. (Which is a sign that SO is self-cleansing)
  • Some are duplicates of other questions (even his own).
  • A large majority start with the same title: Require a code
  • So far none of his questions have accepted answers.

For the most part SO is down-voting, editing, and closing the poor questions. This is good, but if it keeps going is just a waste of time. What can be done to help new poor users to learn to get better at asking questions?

Should they be limited to one question every 12 hours if previous questions are poor? (Poor could be determined by negative score) Is there anything else that can be done to help them to learn to be better or at least stop the user from creating more editing work?

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  • That user became inactive two days later, 2011-04-06. Commented Dec 25, 2018 at 11:42

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There are limits in place, actually. On top of a (somewhat generous on the scale of minutes) limit on the frequency of questions when you have low reputation, there's an automatic question block that occurs if a user has a significant fraction of questions that are low quality. It's based on downvotes, so if the community properly downvotes these kinds of questions, any users who fall into repeated patterns of posting them will get halted in their progress.

Furthermore, this question block is not undone based on question closings or even deletions. The only way to recover involves improving their content to get upvotes.

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  • I was not aware of that. However, that sounds like "extremely" horrible questions cause complete blockages of IPs. I guess I am thinking a temporary block is needed for poor questions (but not necessarily extremely poor questions). Commented Apr 4, 2011 at 13:05
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    @jzd The case you're describing to me, especially under the description of "create paths of destruction", seems to me like this class of user is qualified as "extremely poor questions". This measure is designed pretty much exactly for the kind of user who simply becomes a waste of time for the answerers. Commented Apr 4, 2011 at 13:09
  • in that case it sounds like the problem is not enough down votes on this users questions to trigger the cutoff. Commented Apr 4, 2011 at 13:13

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